Sunday, 8 February 2009

Nice try,but no cigar

One of Tynwald’s good guys is making an attempt to get the empty eight bed drug & alcohol unit at Nobles open.Politicians won’t admit this, but the hold-up is because the DHSS doesn’t want to pay trained staff the going wage. Everything else is in place – always has been, but the politicos would rather quietly refer folk who admit problems to religious parasites, who make church membership and payment of church dues a condition of treatment.Peter Karran MHK is at least, as he says, trying to ‘break the log-jam’ and get the unit open, which he attempted in the House of Keys on 27th Jan.Sadly, he’s also mistakenly helping to hand other people’s money to zombie-loving parasites.At the same session he was moving another amendment to the Social Security (Amendment) Bill. His amendment, officially, would hand some of the benefits of anyone likely to stay a night with Kemmyrk or Graih directly to the hostel management. This could allow both a directly state-run homelessness charity and a confidentially state-run homelessness charity to steal further funds from the homeless.Religious groups have a habit of invoicing the state for services not actually provided to people who don’t even know they appear on the system as having a ‘problem’. It can happen with youth services or drug and alcohol counselling. All it takes is for an enterprising ‘community worker’ to gather a list of people who sit outside the youth club, or someone who talks through an alcohol problem on church premises being encouraged to give names of others ‘so that they can be offered help’.Will people who sleep in a doorway now mysteriously find benefits they couldn’t claim for lack of an address being paid to a ‘charity’ for a bed they never occupied?

About Me

Stuart Hartill is a libertarian and lives on the Isle of Man, so must either choose to be amicably contrarian or get lobotomised and join the herd. An anonymous tax exile there was once quoted by an English journalist to the effect that Manx society is little more than 55,000 alcoholics clinging to a rock.
The population is now nearer 80,000, and everyday life is increasingly dominated by an obnoxious mix of fundamentalist Christians and anal-retentive tax exiles who are no longer welcome anywhere else.
The blogger is none of the above, which makes his life there interesting on even the dullest day and positively hilarious on others.